AIR ONSLAUGHT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 May 1943, Page 3

AIR ONSLAUGHT

GREATEST IN HISTORY OF WARFARE WAY BLASTED FOR ALLIED PUSH. ENTHUSIASM OF GROUND TROOPS. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.40 a.m.) RUGBY, May 7. The Air Under-Secretary, Captain Balfour, and Air Marshal Coningham, commander of the Tactical Air Force, watched from a hilltop the greatest air assault any army has ever had to withstand, with all the bombing concentrated into an area measuring four miles by a thousand yards. This was the assault which blasted the way for the big Allied push in Tunisia on Thursday, It was a gigantic peppering of bombs, with the explosions planted so tightly together that there could not have been many yards of surface untouched, says the Air Ministry news service. R.A.F. and American airmen of the Tactical Air Force had their biggest day on record. British soldiers had never seen anything like it. A R.A.F. officer watched the effect of this field of fire from a hill just west of Massicault, while wave after wave of bombers went over. He said: “The ground troops, unable to restrain their enthusiasm, came running across from their trucks to shake me by the hand and say: ‘By God! what a show!’ ” The hill on which the R.A.F. officer stood was three or four miles west of the Germans. The airman .saw bombers go over while the British army advanced without the slightest hindrance from hostile aircraft. “From the first light until 9.30 in the morning, the sky was densely mottled with bombers,''’ he said. “Each formation had a' tremendous fighter escort. The bombers came from the west, sweeping over a hill into a haze. The whole battlefield was covered with dust.”